Thank you!

Thanks to your advocacy efforts on our behalf, we're happy to report that the recently passed Omnibus Spending Bill includes a very small increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities! While our work is not over with regards to the upcoming 2018 budget to be passed in the fall, the Omnibus Spending Bill represents an endorsement of the important work that the humanities do for our communities. These funds will continue to support our work of providing free access to authoritative content about Virginia's history and culture.

Church of England in Virginia

The Church of England was the established church of the Virginia colony. It came to
Virginia as early as 1607, when the first English colonists settled Jamestown, but was not formally established
by the House of Burgesses until 1619.
Religious life in Virginia reflected the economic, geographic, and political
circumstances of the colony. People from all segments of society attended Anglican
services (although slaves often
worshipped in segregated galleries or attended a separate service). Because
Virginians tended to settle in plantations scattered throughout the countryside
rather than in towns, parishes were
typically larger than those in England. This made it difficult for those who lived in
outlying areas to make the weekly trip to their parish's main church. Instead, most
parishes maintained multiple "chapels of ease" to accommodate far-flung parishioners.
The Church of England in Virginia was subject to laws passed by the General Assembly and, unlike in England,
was supervised at the parish level by vestries (boards of local parishioners). In
Virginia a vestry had the authority to choose—or refuse to induct—a minister for its
parish. This led to a tense relationship between the congregation and the clergy. The
status of the Church of England in Virginia improved late in the seventeenth century,
after the bishop of London appointed minister James Blair to represent his interests in the colony, and on the eve of the
American Revolution (1775–1783), the
church was as powerful as it had ever been. MORE...

Explore Virginia

Share It

Background

When English men and women of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
began to establish colonies in North America, they, like other Europeans, took their
national churches with them to the New World. For English settlers this meant the
Church of England, a peculiar form of Protestantism that had emerged out of the
English Reformation. This hybrid church blended elements of both Protestantism and
Roman Catholicism, retaining an episcopal form of church government (a church
governed by bishops) and combining reformed Protestant theology with the
Christological cycle of the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar—purged of some of its
Marian festivals and celebrations of saints days. (While historians used to claim
that the church's theology borrowed heavily from Calvinism, modern scholars have
begun to debate whether the church's theology tended more toward Calvinism or
Lutheranism.)

Unlike many other Protestant groups, the Church of England developed no particular
creed to define its beliefs and was united more by shared forms of worship set down
in the Book of Common Prayer than by a common theology. By the time of Virginia's
founding in 1607, a number of religious parties coexisted in the Church of England:
Anglicans were generally content with the extent of reform in their national church,
while Puritans believed that the
reformation of the church should continue and remove all vestiges of Roman
Catholicism from the Church of England, including the prayer book's set liturgies,
the use of the sign of the cross at baptism, the use of vestments, and kneeling to
receive communion.

Arrival in Virginia

The Church of England came to Virginia with the first colonists who settled
Jamestown. They soon set aside a makeshift worship space described by John Smith: "Wee did hang an awning (which
is an old saile) to three or foure trees to shadow us from the Sunne, our walls were
rales made of wood, our seats unhewed trees, till we cut plankes, our Pulpit a bar of
wood nailed to two neighbouring trees, in foule weather we shifted into an old rotten
tent, for we had few better … this was our Church." Most of the colony's early
settlers likely sympathized with the Anglican wing of the church—Smith did, as did
John Rolfe and Thomas West, baron De La Warr. A Spanish spy in 1609 claimed
that a majority of the settlers refused to attend services led by a minister whom
they suspected was "somewhat a puritan." That is not to say that the colony enjoyed a
religious homogeneity. It did not. Brownists, Separatist Puritans, and at least a few
Roman Catholics lived in Virginia during the 1610s. In fact, the Pilgrims (a group of
Separatist Puritans) who eventually settled in Plymouth had intended to settle in the
James River Valley of Virginia.

Although the Church of England was not formally established by the House of Burgesses
until 1619, earlier charters assumed that it would be Virginia's church and directed
settlers to follow its practices "in all fundamentall pointes." Leaders of the Virginia Company of London, in fact, took
seriously their obligation to provide for the religious instruction and solace of the
colony's settlers, and from the time of the colony's founding in 1607 until the
company's dissolution in 1624, company leaders tried to maintain a religious presence
in Virginia. Ministers who wished to serve in Virginia under the company had to pass
a rigorous selection process that included preaching a trial sermon before the
company; only the most qualified ministers were accepted. In 1619, under the
company's auspices, the burgesses passed statutes that urged clergy to catechize
individuals who were not yet ready to receive the Eucharist, prescribed penalties for
violating the moral laws of scripture, and required ministers to keep accurate
records of all baptisms, deaths, and marriages, thus giving the church responsibility
for maintaining these vital records.

The Development of the Church in Virginia

With the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624, the Church of England in
Virginia began to suffer. For much of the seventeenth century, neither the English
Church nor the English Crown took much interest in the colony's religious life. The
supply of ministers declined and the colony entered what one historian has called a
"religious starving time." The Church of England that developed in Virginia during
the seventeenth century evolved out of the adaptation of the colony's mother church
to the peculiar circumstances of the colony. This leads to a larger point:
governmental disinterest in the religious life of England's overseas colonies,
combined with the fact that several colonies were established by religious
minorities, meant that the status of the Church of England varied from colony to
colony. It was not so much a single institution in North America as a series of
institutions born out of the church's traditional practices and the particular
economic, political, geographic, and religious circumstances of each of England's
seaboard colonies.

In Virginia, that meant accommodating the church to the colony's tobacco culture. Planting tobacco required
the colonists to abandon England's traditional settlement pattern, and instead of
settling in towns, Virginians established themselves on plantations scattered
throughout the countryside, often along the banks of one of the many rivers that
still divide the Tidewater and Piedmont regions into a series of
peninsulas. This, in turn, led to the formation of parishes much larger than those
typical in England, which, in turn, meant that it was often difficult for settlers to
meet weekly for public church services because so many people lived far away from the
church building. Clergy, all of whom were immigrants during the seventeenth century
and unfamiliar with the colony's peculiar circumstances, found the settlement pattern
vexing as well. Virginians lived like "Hermites … dispersedly
and scatteringly seated upon the sides of Rivers," one minister complained, "as might
make their due and constant attendance upon the publick worship and Service of God
impossible to them."

To address the problem of large parishes and to take the church to the people, most
parishes constructed a number of chapels of ease at convenient spots in outlying
areas in order to facilitate church attendance for parishioners who lived at great
distances from the main, or "mother," church. Colonial ministers served the mother
church and any chapels of ease on a rotating basis, officiating and preaching first
at one church and then the others in their turn, often on successive Sundays,
although sometimes ministers held mid-week or Saturday services at their chapels.
Ministers, in fact, often preached the same sermon several weeks in a row to the
different congregations in their parishes. As a result, many colonists only saw the
rector of the parish once every three or four weeks. In order to provide church
services in the minister's absence, vestries often hired clerks to read prayers from
the Book of Common Prayer and a sermon either from The Book of
Homilies or from the published works of popular English preachers
(particularly, in the eighteenth century, from the discourses of Archbishop of
Canterbury John Tillotson).

The men and women who worshipped in the Church of England in Virginia came from all
segments of society, because, technically, the established church was the church of all
colonists, rich or poor, white or black, slave or free—although slaves often
worshipped in segregated galleries or attended a separate service. Church edifices
varied considerably in appearance, from the stately buildings in Jamestown, Williamsburg (Bruton Parish), and Lancaster County (Christ
Church) to backcountry churches
that resembled tobacco warehouses. The buildings were usually rectangular or
cruciform (cross-shaped) and, by the eighteenth century, were often constructed in the Georgian style. Churches rarely had
steeples. On the interior, Anglican churches in Virginia by the mid-1700s would
typically have been dominated by a two- or three-decker pulpit, usually off to the
side, that would have been the center of attention in the church (the pulpit
emphasizing the Protestant emphasis on preaching). The parish clerk used the lowest
level as a reading desk and led the congregational responses from there. The minister
led the service and read the day's scriptural lessons from the second level. He would
have preached from the highest level of the pulpit. While sermons were of great
interest to colonial Virginians (they sometimes did not attend church on days when
the minister was not present and they would not hear an original discourse), some
parishioners' attention wavered. The Reverend Charles Clay complained of parishioners
who are
hanging first on one hipp then on the other; leaning with their Elbows on the pews or
on the windows … or are Running in & out to the great anoiance & disturbance
of those whose minds are piously inclined. … And while the Psalms for ye Day are
Reading, instead of having a book & answering in turn; are playing with their
Snuff box; dancing their foot with one leg across the other for amusement; or
twirling their Hat about; making their observations on ye Congregation, whispering to
the person that Sits next to them; or Smiling & grinning at others yt sits at a
distance from them.

On the other hand, William Byrd II noted
that not all colonial ministers were the best preachers, commenting that he had
attended at least one service at which the minister had preached the "Congregation
into a Lethargy."

In the small sanctuary, tablets containing the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments,
the Apostles' Creed, and sometimes the Royal Arms would have hung to the side of and
behind the holy table. (The holy table would not have been decorated with flowers or
candles; until at least the late nineteenth century, bishops of Virginia denounced
the use of floral decorations on the holy table during worship services as a novelty
introduced by Roman Catholicism. They did, however, allow the floral decoration of
churches at Christmas, because that practice was grounded in Virginia tradition.)

Church Governance

The shortage of clergy in Virginia led to what historians have called the church's
"laicization," or submission to lay control. Laicization functioned on at least two
levels: Virginia's General Assembly passed laws governing the church, and local
vestries oversaw the day-to-day operation of the individual parishes. County courts often heard cases involving
moral laws that would have fallen under the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts in
England. The assembly routinely set clergy salaries, established new parishes as
the colony's population grew and moved west, defined parish boundaries, set
requirements for church attendance, defined how often ministers should preach and
celebrate the Eucharist, instructed clergy to catechize children in their parishes,
and delegated local authority over church matters to vestries and county courts.
Sometimes these powers were extraordinary. In 1624, for instance, the assembly
modified the traditional liturgical calendar of the Church of England, declaring that
when two holy days followed each other on subsequent days "betwixt the feast of the
annunciation of the blessed virgin [25 March] and St. Michael the archangel [29
September], then only the first to be observed." This was an obvious accommodation to
the colony's tobacco culture.

Vestries gained powers much greater than their counterparts in England, most
importantly the authority to "elect and make choyce of their ministers," a right
legislated by the General Assembly as early as 1643. In England, that power lay with
the parish patron. There, the bishop then inducted the minister into his appointed
parish, or cure, which he generally held for life unless he committed serious moral
offenses. Virginia's church government did not function that way. Vestries frequently
refused to induct their ministers (the colonial governor would have performed the
induction) and hired their clergy on annual contracts. This practice may have
originated in the seventeenth century to help vestries protect themselves from
continuing the services of a poor minister. Certainly there were some clergy who were
not the best of men, but the number of those ministers has been routinely
overestimated.

Nonetheless, clergy from England resented the power of Virginia's vestries and their
refusal to induct ministers into their cures. The Reverend Morgan Godwyn denounced
colonial vestries as "Plebian Juntos" and "hungry Patrons" who often preferred to
hire lay readers rather than ministers because the costs were lower. Another minister
complained that clergy in Virginia "have 12 Lay patrons [vestrymen] whom we must
humour or run the risque of Deprivation." Because elections for vestrymen only
occurred with the establishment of a new parish or the modification of an old one—and
deceased members were replaced through recommendations of the sitting members—the
powers of any particular vestry could rarely be challenged. The conflict between
vestries and clergy was not simply between different conceptions of church
government; it actually represented the construction in Virginia of a new form of
church government in which local vestries shared authority with bishops in England.
By the end of the seventeenth century, one could argue that the church in Virginia
was English in theology and colonial in form.

In 1675, when Henry Compton became bishop of London, the see (or office)
traditionally charged with overseeing the church in the colonies, the fortunes of
Virginia's Church of England began to improve. He recruited more and better men to
serve the colonial church and required all who wished to serve a colonial cure to
present a certificate from an English bishop testifying to the individual's orthodoxy
and good moral character. He also introduced the commissary system to Virginia and
several other colonies. Commissaries acted as representatives of the bishop of
London, held some authority over the clergy, and, at least in Virginia, often served
on the governor's Council. They could
not, however, ordain men to the priesthood or the rank of deacon and did not have the
authority to confirm individuals. Colonial men who wished to become ministers in the
Church of England still had to make a dangerous journey to England to be ordained and
then travel back to North America. During the eighteenth century, about one in six
North American postulants died before completing a return journey to the
colonies.

James Blair, the colony's most important commissary, served in the position from his
appointment in 1689 until his death in 1743. He was instrumental in founding the College of William and Mary, which began
educating growing numbers of ministers for Virginia's church, and he managed to
convince the General Assembly to raise clergy salaries to 16,000 pounds of tobacco a year
and to pass an act requiring all parishes to purchase glebe lands and a "convenient
dwelling house for the reception and aboad of the minister of such parish." He was
less successful at convincing the assembly to require the induction of
clergy. Blair, in fact, was never inducted into his position at Bruton Parish and
eventually came to side with the vestries on the induction issue.

As a result of Blair and Compton's work, nearly 80 percent of Virginia parishes were
being served by clergy by 1703. This progress continued throughout the remainder of
the colonial period, although a series of clergy deaths coupled with the expansion of
the colony in the 1720s briefly slowed the progress. Only when the American
Revolution broke out—when parishioners refused to support Loyalist clergy and the
bishop of London, Richard Terrick, refused to ordain rebels—did the established
Church of England in Virginia face a crisis that weakened it substantially. In fact,
despite the inroads made by dissenters such as the Baptists and the Presbyterians, on the eve of revolution, Virginia's established church was
likely stronger than it ever had been.